Ivan's Story
by CaffeinatedKitty
Summary: It's not Ivan's fault he's like this... The person at fault isn't either one of his sisters... The blame goes to his kidnapper. Kidnapped-verse oneshot in Katyusha/Ukraine's POV. I do not own Hetalia.


Warning: Mildly confusing time skips. Katyusha/Ukraine's POV. Character death.

* * *

Ivan Braginski. Many know him simply as the man who kidnapped and tortured Lovino and Feliciano Vargas, but that's not his whole story. You see, _мой младший брат_* went through a dark, terror filled decade.. That is eerily similar to the time that the two Italians spent in his house.

* * *

"Vanya? Vanya?" I called, peering out of the back door. "You need to come inside, it's getting cold." The only response I got was the whispering of the wind. Ivan was only five, and the most adorable little boy I have ever seen. His red-violet eyes set him apart from the other kindergarteners, marking him an outcast, but he was still as sweet as could be. He had gone outside after our little sister, but she had come back inside and he had not.

"Vanya, Natalia's inside!" I myself was eight at the time, and Natalia was three. "Vanya!" We wouldn't see him again for ten years.

Meanwhile, we went through our own set of troubles.

"Ye li'l... Bitch..." Our father slurred, going after Natalia.

"No- Papa, what are you doing? Natalia didn't do anything...!"

"Yesh... She did... She took away m'boy... M' only boy...!" I thought for a moment that he would sit down and cry until he passed out, but he didn't. He kept advancing towards her, my young, innocent sister of only five years old.

"Papa...!" And I could do nothing about it as he beat her, beat my sweet little sister until she was black and blue. But Natalia didn't blame anyone except our father. She didn't blame Ivan for being kidnapped, she didn't blame me or our mother for being too weak to do anything.

Instead, Natalia began to develop an obsession over our brother, although she had hardly known him. She was constantly demanding stories about him. Then someone told Natalia that when you loved someone, you married them, and she began to declare that when we found Ivan, they would be married. As the beatings grew more and more frequent, and he began to target our mother and I, Natalia took to sleeping with a knife under her pillow. But she wasn't the end of him- it was his beloved vodka that did him in.

One evening he went out to drink, and never came back. We got a call a day later, saying that he had died of alcohol poisoning. The three of us looked around at each other, silently celebrating now that the thing that had been the patriarch of the family was dead. Of course, we managed to look sad at the funeral- it _was_ sad, knowing that the kind, loving father we had once known was never coming back. But we couldn't help but remember the violent, drunken monster that had taken over after Ivan disappeared, seven years ago.

* * *

Ivan waited. He waited for nearly a week before he figured that his captors weren't coming back, and he finally began the long trek to the nearby city. When Ivan reached it, he knocked on the first door he could find.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but do you know where the police station is?" He smiled shyly as the woman stared at him- barely clothed, obviously underfed, scars and bruises covering his chest and back. She nodded numbly, gingerly taking his hand and leading him through the suburbs. They reached an ominous gray building and the woman left him there, hoping he'd know what to do. Ivan took a breath and looked around quickly, used to doing so in search of his kidnappers, and pushed open the door.

* * *

The phone rang. "Who's that? It's like, six in the morning..." Natalia grumbled, getting up to answer it.

"Huh..? Police? WHAT?! Ivan?!" She clapped a hand over the receiver and shouted, "мама! Kat! It's the police! They say they've found Ivan!"

I was already awake and on my way to the living room. "I-Is it true?" I took the phone from her hands and held it to my ear. "D-Do you really have my little brother?"

A gentle voice, much like my own, answered. "Da, Kat, I escaped."

"Oh, Vanya, I'm so happy... I thought we'd never see you again, we thought you were dead...!"

"No," he said, "Not dead, but tortured."

The bluntness of his words was shocking. It was almost as if he hadn't changed at all, hadn't matured since the last time we saw him...

* * *

"Vanya...!" I hugged him hard, not wanting to let go.

"сестра... Let go, you're choking me.."

"Oh no!" I backed away, holding him at arm's length as I looked him over. "I didn't hurt you, did I?!"

"No, I'm okay." Ivan smiled. I noticed that he had grown a lot taller, nearly surpassing me in height. Natalia came into the room. She stood in the doorway for a moment, then rushed forward and threw her arms around Ivan.

"Vanya!"

"Natalia?"

She nodded, and his smile grew. "You got so big while I was gone..."

"Brother..." Natalia looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes.

"Da, 'talia?"

"Marry me." It wasn't a request, it was more like an order.

"Wh-What?"

"Marry me."

"I can't, we're siblings..." Ivan was finding it hard to say no to her.

"Why?"

"Because, brothers and sisters can't marry each other.."

"Not even if they love each other?"

"Ah, there's a difference between sibling love and love-love."

"What's the difference?"

"Natalia, I can't explain it..."

"Kat? Can you explain it?" Now Natalia turned to me.

"There is a special kind of love siblings reserve for each other, and their parents... It doesn't make them want to get married, they simply love that person in that special way. Then there's love-love, the kind of love people have for their girlfriend or boyfriend, and eventually their husband or wife."

"Okay." Natalia accepted that answer, which Ivan and I were glad for. She couldn't go on thinking that it was alright for siblings to marry each other.

We quickly settled back into normal life, hardly remembering that Ivan hadn't been there for ten years of our lives. but soon we began to notice little quirks, odd, occasionally childish behavior. He would constantly look around, over his shoulder, as if searching for someone. Ivan's voice had dropped a little, though it was barely lower than my own, and he still spoke like the small child we had known. He never mentioned it, but I knew that some of his classmates picked on him because of his seemingly never-ending hunger and odd high-pitched voice. They didn't understand. No one did. Not even Natalia and I understood the pain, the fear he felt, even after hearing the story dozens of times.

Ivan had had no way to tell time, no way of knowing how much time was passing while he was gone. Except for one kind woman, a sister or maybe a daughter of one of his captors. He says that she was the one that gave him food, let him use the bathroom, even cut his hair. Ivan says that she tried to give him more than the amount of food that the captors allowed, even under the threat of harsh punishment. She had been punished, whipped like he had been. She didn't try that any more. He had been fed two slices of bread and some water- he didn't know how much- every day. It was really no surprise that he was so thin, so hungry all the time. Ivan had almost made himself sick after he got home, eating enough to feed all four of us.

He quickly got back to a normal size- only, it didn't seem normal to the other tenth graders. Ivan was tall for his age, with a lot of muscle from running around with Natalia making him appear larger than he was. Again, he didn't mention it, but I heard the taunts. Heard them with my own ears.

"You're fat."

"What do you hide under that coat, six pillows?"

"How the _hell_ did you get so damn tall? Drugs or something?!"

"Dude, what is _with_ your voice? Are you secretly a girl?"

And I knew that when Ivan finally snapped, it wouldn't be his fault.

* * *

I was sitting on a wide branch of the tree in our front yard, reading a book, when Ivan got home. I saw that some of the boys that bullied him had followed him home. "Oh... No..."

"Hey,_ Braginski_!"

Ivan jolted with surprise. "What do you want... Dmitri..."

For some reason, Dmitri looked up, and I caught his attention. "Oh nothing... Except your sister up there." His voice was practically _dripping_ with lust. I shuddered. I decided then that I'd pretend not to listen... But I would hear every word that they said.

"She cold? I'd be glad to... _Warm her up_..."

"Don't you _dare_ talk about my sister in that way." Ivan growled, voice growing lower than it had been in quite a while.

"Why not?" Dmitri jeered. "She looks like she'd be a good lay."

That was it.

I almost jumped down and intervened, but I remembered that I wasn't paying attention, in their eyes. Then I saw that I didn't need to. Ivan had picked up a fallen branch and was advancing towards them, a menacing red-violet aura- the same color as his eyes- enveloping the air around him.

"Dude, what's with that?" Dmitri and his friends were backing away, fear in their eyes. "You're creeping us out..."

Now I could hear that he was chanting something quietly, sounding almost like a growl. "Kolkolkolkolkolkolkolkol..." He held the stick over his shoulder like a baseball bat, walking after them just slow enough to look threatening. The bullies had had enough. They turned around and broke into a run, terror fueling their speed. Ivan chased after them, anger keeping him right on their heels. Dmitri stumbled for a moment, and that was all Ivan needed. He caught Dmitri and hit him in his side, sending him flying. Dmitri hit the ground and had the breath knocked out of him.

Ivan followed after him and pressed a foot on his chest. "Promise me that you will get out of my life and get your eyes off of my sister." he growled, eyes afire with rage.

"Dude, sure, whatever, just get your foot off me...!"

"Promise." Ivan glared down at him; with his enormous height, it was no surprise that the guy was terrified.

"I... Promise..." Dmitri was gasping for breath. His friends were just around the corner, probably debating whether or not to save him. Ivan finally let him up and Dmitri scrambled to his feet, backing a good distance away before holding up his hands. "Had my fingers crossed." And he took off running, Ivan not bothering to chase after him.

Instead he walked back towards me, paling at the thought of what had just happened. "Kat," Ivan looked up at me, tears filling his eyes. "I... _liked_ that.. I liked seeing his fear... His pain..."

I jumped out of the tree, abandoning the book. "It's okay, Vanya, he deserved it." I wrapped my arms around him and buried my head in his chest. "Dmitri is a vile creature."

We grew up quickly. It didn't seem like more than two months by the time I was in my early thirties. It was around then that we lost our mother. The funeral was sadder than the one for our father- our mother had kept us fed us, comforted us, _loved _us for nearly twenty years. We missed her already. By then, Ivan had gotten very successful. He worked until he had enough money to get a huge house in the country, then bought the one that he liked.

The address was 6294 Sunflower Drive. Natalia and I would visit him every day. But Natalia's love for Ivan had grown; she no longer loved him as only a sibling. She constantly followed him around begging for marriage. Ivan was actually growing afraid of Natalia. He still liked her as a sister, but he couldn't stand her presence, when it was steadily growing more threatening as he rejected her time and time again.

It was when he met a kind Canadian girl named Madeline that everything started going wrong. It wasn't that they hated each other; in fact, it wasn't long before they discovered that they each loved the other. But it made Natalia sad, and a little angry, to see that her beloved brother was truly happy with someone other than her. Nearly a year after they began dating, Ivan proposed. He gave her a beautiful silver ring with two tiny rubies on either side of a slightly larger diamond- she loved it and said yes immediately. They were so happy together.

Then the accident happened. It had started out as a lovely day. They had woken up to find that there was no maple syrup in the house- it had seemed so silly at the time. They had laughed over it, then Madeline left Ivan with a kiss and a promise to be back soon. She never came back. Ivan got the call not long after Madeline left. She had been crossing the road from the grocery store, syrup in hand, when a reckless driver ran the red light and hit her.

Madeline was killed on impact.

Ivan was devastated. The two had had such high hopes for their future together; they even had a baby on the way. It wasn't long before he began to blame himself, saying that he never should have let her go out alone. Both Natalia and I went to the funeral- Natalia went out of respect, but I had liked Madeline. She was such a sweet girl. But they had done a good job with her funeral. There was little black- mostly red and white, her favorite colors.

They had laid Madeline so she looked like she could have been sleeping, long blonde hair spread over the silky pillow, blue-violet eyes closed and a peaceful smile upon her face. Ivan could hardly see to walk to her casket, tears blurring his vision. He laid a bouquet of red and white roses on her chest, folding her hands over the tied stems. I was close enough to see Ivan kiss her forehead, hear him whisper that she was beautiful even in death. I think that Madeline's death was what finally snapped the last thread of sanity that he had.

A few days after the funeral, he came home late. Natalia and I didn't know why until the next day- we had left when it got late. Ivan had brought home a small Latvian boy, saying he adopted him.

The boy's name was Raivis.

This is where my tale ends and his begins.

* * *

*My little brother

мама-mom(this should've been obvious ^.^)

сестра-sister

I'M SORRY I KILLED OFF NYO!CANADA! Let's just say that Matthew from Kidnapped is her reincarnation! I came up with an explanation for the age thing! :D Let's say that Mattie almost died when he was 9/10, but Madeline's ghost gave him her life force because she couldn't use it any more. Except Ivan would practically kill himself over the fact that he shot the reincarnation of his fiancé... Even though he lived...

Arg. When I wrote the part between Dmitri and Ivan, I kept forgetting that I wasn't writing for Je suis desole... O.o

I reread Madeline's death/funeral and nearly cried. :'(


End file.
